Networks Blast Trump Over End to Subsidies, Hide the Payments’ Illegality

The Trump hating biased media wing of the Democrats’ Party is up to its old tricks. During the five days since it was announced late Thursday that President Donald J. Trump decided his administration would immediately stop paying the illegal cost-sharing subsidies that reimburse insurers for reducing the deductibles and co-pays of certain ObamaCare enrollees the media has tried its best to hide the fact that those payments are unconstitutional.

As SCOTUSblog reported, on May 12, 2016 U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, in a thirty-eight-page ruling, found the reimbursement payments without the money being appropriated by Congress violates the Constitution:

Paying out reimbursement without an appropriation [from Congress] violates the Constitution. Congress authorized reduced cost-sharing but did not appropriate monies for it, in the fiscal year 2014 budget or since. Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one.

The Media Research Center’s “Newsbusters” carefully watched the networks’ reporting on President Trump’s decision to end the illegal payments. They found that through the weekend, ABC, CBS and NBC dedicated barely three percent of their coverage to informing viewers those payments were unconstitutional:

From Friday morning, October 13, through Sunday evening, October 15, the ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening news shows aired a total of 38 minutes, 8 seconds of coverage of the Trump administration’s decision to end the illegal subsidy payments begun under the Obama administration. Only 71 seconds of that airtime — none of it on NBC! — was spent on the important point that these payments were being made without Congressional authorization, and thus unconstitutional, according to a May 2016 federal court decision.

[. . .]

But CBS spent only 54 seconds on the failure of the Obama administration and the Democrats to secure proper authorization for these taxpayer payments, out of about 15 and a half minutes of airtime devoted to Trump’s decision to end them.

For its part, ABC spent just 17 seconds (out of 15 minutes and a half minutes) on this point, tersely passing along the White House position without any background. “In a statement overnight, the White House said it determined the payments are unlawful,” ABC’s Jon Karl stated on Friday’s Good Morning America.

In roughly 9 minutes of coverage, NBC’s Today and Nightly News didn’t even go that far, never telling viewers about either the prior court ruling (as CBS did) or even that the Trump administration said they were illegal payments (as ABC did).

Instead, the news coverage focused on anecdotal stories about those benefiting from the payments, and the “fear” they faced with the prospect of those subsidies ending. The networks appeared unconcerned without that no proper authorization for the government spending ever existed.